“They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and turning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.” – Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Kyle Minor is the author of In the Devil’s Territory.
John Madera's fiction may be found in Conjunctions, Opium Magazine, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His criticism may be found in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
Thanks Kyle. This is the 1st sentence of the book, no?
For all of eternity this book will be intertwined with Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstock because of her first line (as well), ‘I came upon a child of God…’
Kyle,
I particularly dig how you frame this to be about tuning our language to the world sonically while the description is of a sort of tuning, or at least one instrument is being tuned while the rest are going on as if they always have, so tuning amidst the turning, amidst the din, even better.